I was risking blowing three years of work on the force, not to mention my life, but I didn’t have any choice. This case was too important to not push my way onto it.

I had just pulled the waistband of the mini up over my hips when Becky stepped around the long row of lockers. I was still deciding how I was going to explain my insistence on taking the case, and hadn’t worked out the details yet. I opted to distract her, to give me more time to think.

“I love those heels, Janie. When you bend over to put them on, it really does something for me.”

Yeah, I knew that. That’s why I did it. “You do?” Upside down, I batted my eyes at her from around my thighs, my voice dripping with playfully faux innocence. Becky might have been my boss, but she was putty in my hands. I strapped on the second shoe, and set my feet as wide as the skirt would allow.

“I think you might need to check to make sure I’m ready for duty, Captain.”

Becky smiled broadly, and stepped up close behind me. She reached up under my skirt and grabbed me roughly, dragging her fingers hard over my thong. Pulling it aside, she plunged two fingers inside and reached for the back of my head, yanking me halfway upright by my long auburn locks. After working her fingers around a moment, she pulled me upright and extracted her fingers. I let her spin me around to bring us nose to nose as she tasted her fingers, sucking one completely clean before offering me the second.

Staring straight into her eyes, I remained silent while I waited for her appraisal.

“Oh, I’m sure you’re ready, I could smell it from three feet away, you horny bitch. Our friend Mr. Haubrich won’t stand a chance against you with all that musk in the air.”

“Millimeters,” the nearly silent whisper perfectly audible. The breath of the whisper a warm breeze on the lips. Hand interrupting the airflow of the room on the nearly invisible hairs of the cheek. Eyelashes mimicking the intricate mating dance of the jumping spider.

“No,” the reply loaded with insistence and impatience. “Zero,” the new distance proclaimed.

Gah. At what point does it become not okay to force your neuroses on other people?

In Richmond Kentucky, Kymberly Clem purchased a dress in the local mall. The following day, the twenty year old Eastern Kentucky University student wore that same dress back to the mall. Ten minutes later, a mall rent-a-cop approached her, made her turn in a circle while he “inspected” her, and then escorted her from the premises.

“He made me turn all the way around while he stared me up and down,” Kymberly said. “The only thing he said was that other people didn’t like the way I looked, so he wanted me to leave.”

The guard also said several women had complained because their husbands were staring at her, she said.

That’s right. If you turn the head of some prudish old church lady’s husband, you’re too sexy for the Richmond Mall.

Even the people coming to her defense are just not getting it, though.

Her sister Kendra is quoted in the article, thus:

“It’s discrimination and she has the right to wear what she wants. We’re just trying to make people understand that you can’t (discriminate). I think as Americans, we have the right to wear what we would like as long as we are not showing any private body parts.”

Why the final caveat? Why is there the presumption that showing “private” body parts in our society is inherently negative?

Similarly, a local blogger comments with the presumption that the body is to be hidden away, that nudity is intrinsically bad:

“It was short, but showed nothing that is illegal to show. Personally, I’ve seen worse on Eastern’s campus than what this young lady was wearing.”

“Worse”? Define “worse” for me. And why is your definition of “worse” any better than mine, or Kate’s, or Kymberly’s or Lenny’s Pizza Delivery Guy’s?

The George W. Bush Presidential Library is now in the planning stages.

The Library will include:

The Hurricane Katrina Room , which is still under construction.
The Alberto Gonzales Room, where you won’t be able to remember anything.
The Texas Air National Guard Room, where you don’t even have to show up.
The Walter Reed Hospital Room, where they don’t let you in.
The Guantanamo Bay Room, where they don’t let you out.
The Weapons of Mass Destruction Room, which no one has been able to find.
The National Debt room which is huge and has no ceiling.
The ‘Tax Cut’ Room with entry only to the wealthy.
The ‘Economy Room’ which is in the toilet.

The bedroom was beginning to lighten with shades of pink and orange when Anne drifted into consciousness. The smell of the fresh sheets mingled freely with the scents of their lovemaking the night before. Detergent fragrance and fresh sea air intertwined with Anne and Jean and flavored lube and perfume and cologne and wine, all rolled together in a heady mix of overpowering smelly stuff.

Anne was taking all this in, this strange and wonderful mixture, when she noted the interloping undercurrent on the wind, something she recognized, but couldn’t immediately identify. It was deep and rich… coffee. Yes, someone had made coffee. Someone. Jean. He wasn’t in the bed and then she realized that in the end, he wasn’t supposed to be, either. His absence from her side was as alien as his presence would have been. She smiled sleepily at the thought, then began the process of sitting up, shaking her hair loose, and running her hands through the long locks to substitute for a brush. A hastily straightened rat’s nest, but it would do. She was quite sure Jean wouldn’t mind. After all, he was the cause of it in the first place, he could hardly complain about it.

Looking over the side of the bed, Anne found the short silk robe on the hardwood and slipped it on, tying it loosely about her waist as she slid from the bed. She liked the feel of the silk against her skin, and loved the way it fit her so perfectly, barely reaching the bottom of her ass cheeks. She found a pair of white ankle socks in the top dresser drawer and got them on her feet, taking a moment as she bent over to glance behind her at the full length mirror in the corner. She found the view of her own bare pussy lips there strangely beautiful and arousing. She paused only for a moment, then straightened and padded off in search of the coffee pot, acutely aware of silk and sea breeze brushing her nipples beneath the mostly open robe.

PITTSBURGH – Karen Fletcher, the Donora, Pennsylvania woman who ran the RedRoseStories.com Website, which the government charged contained obscene text pieces involving sex with and torture of underage characters, today pleaded guilty to six counts of “using an interactive computer service to distribute obscene materials.”

Fletcher, whose site had 29 subscribers worldwide and charged $10 per month for access – then her sole source of income – received, under a plea agreement worked out between U.S. Attorney Mary Beth Buchanan’s office, Assistant U.S. Attorney Stephen R. Kaufman and Trial Attorney Michael Yoon, both of the Child Exploitation and Obscenity Section (CEOS) of the Justice Department, and defense counsel Jerry Mooney and Lawrence W. Walters, a sentence of five years’ probation, including six months of house arrest with electronic monitoring, plus a $1,000 fine. U.S. District Judge Joy Flowers Conti pronounced the sentence, and could have imposed as much as five years in prison, but the government agreed that such a sentence was not appropriate.

What’s really disturbing about this is that the court is deciding that written words can be deemed obscene, and that you, and I, can go to jail for writing down the things in our heads. We don’t have to act on them, we don’t even have to want to act on them. We write them down, we go to jail because somebody else finds them disturbing or offensive.

Not sexual images of underaged children. Not threats. Not descriptions of actual events. Just thoughts in our heads unapproved by the state. Under such a ruling, Lolita would land Nabokov in jail. Didn’t we already fight this battle? Oh yeah, we did. Timothy Sandefur has the legal dissection over at Freespace.

Most of all, given the fact that the written stories in question are unquestionably fictitious, it’s hard not to see these prosecutions as simple moralizing: as attempts, in the Osborne Court’s words, at paternalistically controlling the heads of the people who write these stories. Now, the general public may find such stories highly offensive, but that is not gounds for prosecuting them. Just about everybody has some sexual fantasy or other that they would be extremely embarrassed to make public—fantasies they would never act out in real life.

Second UPDATE: Belfair Washington shuts down bikini coffee shop – “The county says the barely covered baristas were erotic entertainment, not allowed in Belfair.” Stephanie Postier, a resident with her granny panties in an extremely tight knot, says, “You should have blacked out windows. You should have an age limit to come through something like this. This is adult entertainment and it is not for our town.” Meanwhile, I think her top is cut a little too low, and she should be run out of town as well.

The Christian Right’s Ultra-Victorian masochistic obsession with stamping out sex and bare skin has reached new lows of self-denying asshattery in little Lavonia, Georgia. Watching these morons cut off their noses to spite their scowling faces would be comical, were it not for the fact they seek to force the rest of us to join them in their retarded self-flagellism.

Via the Independent Mail, cometh the words of the Top Tard hisself, Mayor Ralph Owens:

“Several months ago, I proposed we take our reserve fund and pay off the bond fund for the water treatment plant upgrade, which would have resulted in a savings of over $1.2 million dollars in interest payments,” Owens began. “Since then, the city was offered a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to get rid of a very undesirable business in Lavonia. The transaction has now been finalized, and we can make history for our city. By purchasing the Cafe Risque property, the city can now rid itself of that terrible business and the awful (Interstate 85) billboard blight (of advertisements for the café).”

The town has been collectively wanking off for years at the thought of those naked bodies out by the interstate interchange. The club owner, Jerry Sullivan, opened his doors in ’01, and the doors stayed open right up until this past week, two years after his death.

The Independent Mail gets in a few aspersions, cheap shots tossed at a guy who can’t defend himself because he’s dead, accusing Mr. Sullivan of deceiving the City about what sort of (legal either way) business he was intending to open. I suppose we should just take the word of the reporter for that, beings that he seems to have gotten his information from an obviously objective city council member – that one over there – the one with the really big torch.

What is apparently the tale of city council member David Howell is passed off as fact, without any evidence whatever that the reporter bothered to look any further. It’s unsurprising that such mindless parroting of authority passes for journalism in the Orwellian America of the Bible Belt, but still depressing.

The heirs of the club eventually decided to sell the club, but refused to sell to the town. The town of course took the honest and honorable, good Christian high road:

“Then several months ago, we heard the owners were trying to sell it,” [city manager Gary] Fesperman said. “We knew they would never sell it to us, but a third party, who does not want to be identified, offered to buy it for us. Just before noon (Tuesday) we closed on the property, and the keys were turned over to us. They (former Cafe Risque owners) won’t find out until (today) who really bought it.”

The town’s first order of business upon surreptitiously gaining title to the establishment? Round up the villagers and light the torches. The Independent Mail even has pictures of this glorious moment in Lavonia History, so check them out!

The news resulted in cheers and a standing ovation from the crowd, who then followed the mayor out to the Cafe Risque site. There, all of the signage was removed from the building by a tractor, dragged to the center of the parking lot and burned in a large bonfire as more onlookers clapped and cheered.